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Inquiry: An
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Heidegger, Truth, and

Reference
Mark A. Wrathall
Published online: 06 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Mark A. Wrathall (2002) Heidegger, Truth, and

Reference, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 45:2,
217-228, DOI: 10.1080/002017402760093306

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/002017402760093306

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 Inquiry, 45, 217–28

Symposium: Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure*

Heidegger, Truth, and Reference

Mark A. Wrathall
Brigham Young University
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Two of the best-known features of Heidegger’s thought are his analysis of

truth in terms of disclosure and uncovering, and his insistence on the fact that
we always live in, and encounter the world out of, an understanding of being.
These claims ought to be relevant to contemporary work in the philosophy of
language and mind, but Heidegger’s followers are all too often unable to
clearly articulate the basis, the implications, and, indeed, even the content of
Heidegger’s views.
The great virtue of Cristina Lafont’s Heidegger, Language, and World-
disclosure is the careful and rigorous way in which she analyzes and
examines Heidegger’s views. She proposes a clear interpretation of
Heidegger’s views on truth and language. She examines the tacit foundations
of these views (as she interprets them), and she exposes the untenable
consequences entailed by them. In particular, she argues that Heidegger gives
a ‘constitutive rank to language’, by which she means that everything is
constituted as what it is through and in terms of our linguistic categories. This
view, she argues, ‘gives rise to the myth’ in Heidegger ‘that the limits of my
language are the limits of my world’ (p. 8). Consequently, all the truths I
know or could know are only true relative to my historically contingent way
of linguistically constituting the world.
Heidegger’s views of language and truth, Lafont concludes, lead to an
‘extreme linguistic idealism’. Because what we can experience is directly a
function of what we already know, prior to any experience, she argues that
Heidegger’s position entails that we can never learn something new, never
revise our beliefs on the basis of experience, etc. (see, e.g., p. 248). Thus, her
book amounts to something of a reductio ad absurdum of a certain way of
thinking about language and truth.
But is this way of thinking really Heidegger’s? I believe it is not, and I think
that Lafont’s interpretation goes astray in three important respects. First,

* Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosur e, trans. Graham Harman

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), originally published as Sprache und
Welterschliessung : Zur linguistische n Wende der Hermeneutik Heideggers (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). All unprefixed page references are to the English translation.

# 2002 Taylor & Francis

 218 Mark A. Wrathall

being under the spell of the ‘linguistic turn’ in analytic philosophy, Lafont
insists that all meaning is linguistic meaning and reads Heidegger
accordingly. Next, she attributes to Heidegger an ‘implicit theory’ about
semantics – namely, that meaning determines reference. Finally, she
interprets Heidegger’s doctrines of disclosure and uncovering as a confused
attempt to deŽ ne truth in terms of a criterion of truth. Neither the implicit
assumptions about meaning and reference nor the confusion about truth are
fairly attributable to Heidegger. In the remarks that follow, I focus primarily
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on the second of these traits of Lafont’s reading, but I also try to touch on the
Ž rst and third.
Let me begin by brie y reviewing Lafont’s reading of Heidegger.
Heidegger, according to Lafont, believes that:
1. All meaning – even the meaning implicit in an understanding of being – is
linguistic meaning.
2. Meaning (the understanding of being) determines reference in the sense of
uniquely Ž xing the objects that are referred to.
Lafont claims that Heidegger understands (2) ‘in strict analogy with the
presuppositions of transcendental philosophy’ and, as a consequence,
believes that meaning ‘determines a priori any possible experience’. As a
result, when we combine (1) and (2) with a third Heideggerian thesis:
3. Meaning is always already given,
bad consequences ensue: inhabitants of Heidegger-land are stuck in a way of
experiencing the world that has a normative claim on us but which we are
powerless to revise. We get a very bad model of the sciences, we lose all
objectivity, and are stuck in idealism and relativism.
Fortunately, Lafont thinks, Heidegger was simply working with a bad
model of language. Thanks to Donnellan and Putnam and others, she argues,
we now know that (2) is false. Lafont seems to accept (1) as non-problematic,
and she thinks that without (2) we are free to accept (3) in a trivial, non-
threatening sense.
I believe, however, that Heidegger accepts neither (1) nor (2). And without
(1) and (2), (3) would not have all the cataclysmic consequences Lafont fears.
The main point that I intend to address is the correctness of attributing (2) to
Heidegger. But since part of Lafont’s reason for attributing (2) to Heidegger
is her belief that he accepts (1), I will address (1).

I. Meaning and Reference

In philosophy of language, the thesis that meaning determines reference
(MDR) is a thesis about the role that certain terms play in Ž xing the truth
 Heidegger, Truth, and Reference 219

conditions of a sentence. The idea of MDR is simply that the meaning of a

term1 is in itself sufŽ cient to Ž x the reference of the term. Any speaker who
understands the meaning of a term will therefore have at least implicit
knowledge of the conditions under which an object can be the referent of the
term. Once an object is identiŽ ed as the referent of the naming term, the
predicate of the sentence will tell us (presumably via its subjectively grasped
content) the conditions under which the object is mapped onto a truth value.
Thus, if one could show that (at least sometimes) something other than the
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meaning of the term is needed to Ž x its referent, one would show that MDR is
false. Putnam, for instance, argues that the reference of a term is sometimes
Ž xed by social factors like the way others use a certain term. In addition, he
argues that reference might be determined by features like the microstructure
of the objects named by the term.2 In both cases, then, the reference can be
determined by features of which we are potentially ignorant in using the term.
Donnellan argues that it is possible to use a description to refer to something
which, in fact, doesn’t satisfy the description. This is a different sort of
objection to MDR than Putnam’s, but in both cases the arguments are meant
to show that the reference of a term can be determined otherwise than by the
subjectively grasped meaning of the term.
Is there any reason to believe that Heidegger accepts MDR? There is, on
the face of it, something a little incongruous in attributing such a view to
Heidegger in light of his total lack of interest in providing any sort of detailed
semantic theory. Not surprisingly, given his hostility to theoretical
approaches to the study of language, he never explicitly adopted a position
in the still-open debate over the way naming terms function in such a theory.
Lafont suggests, however, that several explicit claims Heidegger makes
amount to an endorsement of MDR. And she argues repeatedly that other
important views Heidegger articulates only make sense given the assumption
of MDR. I Ž nd none of these arguments persuasive.
Before turning to these arguments, a couple of observations are in order.
First, a reminder that Lafont is attributing much more than a semantical
theory to Heidegger. She sees Heidegger as adopting a transcendentalized
MDR, according to which our subjective understanding of meanings governs
not just what we can refer to with our words, but what we can experience in
sense perception. For Heidegger, Lafont claims, ‘it is through the meanings of
the expressions we use that the entities referred to with these expressions
become accessible as such. In this way, the meaning of a word, as the implicit
description of what it names, determines “as what” and “as how” this appears
to us’ (pp. 193–4).
Now, in this broadened, transcendentalized sense, the version of MDR that
Lafont wants to attribute to Heidegger is a very strong claim. As Lafont notes,
if Heidegger were simply advancing the weaker hypothesis that whenever we
experience anything, ‘we have always already understood entities in one way
 220 Mark A. Wrathall

or other’, his claim would be unobjectionable. But she sees him as advancing
the much stronger thesis that ‘the way in which we in fact have always already
understood everything is constitutive of what things are or of what things we
can refer to’ (p. 139, n31). In fact, I think something very much like this
weaker hypothesis is Heidegger’s actual position. No one would deny that
Heidegger believes our experience of things is guided by a meaningfully
structured understanding of the world. As I read Heidegger, however, it is not
possible to get from this uncontroversial claim to the strong, transcendental
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version of MDR, because our understanding of the world is primarily an

existential rather than a linguistic grasp of it. We are ‘always already
immediately dwelling among things’, Heidegger writes, so that for us ‘there is
no outside, for which reason it is also absurd to talk about an inside’.3 By this,
he means that our intentional states (including beliefs, perceptions, and such)
necessarily have their content Ž xed by the beings with which we are engaged
in being in the world. Consequently, I see Heidegger as an early advocate of
the decidedly anti-MDR view that something more than subjectively grasped
meanings is determinative of our experience of the world.
But I can’t argue in any detail for this interpretation of Heidegger here.
Instead, I want to ask, what would it take for Lafont to justify attributing the
stronger claim to Heidegger? From what we’ve seen so far about MDR, we
can conclude that a necessary condition for showing that Heidegger does
accept MDR in the strong, transcendental sense, is showing that for him the
meanings in terms of which we understand things are subjective and
internalist, i.e. that their content can be grasped independently of any
knowledge about objects or events in the world. By the same token, if
Heidegger, like Putnam, believes that the things themselves are at least co-
constitutive of our understanding of meanings, then we would have
compelling grounds to deny that an internalist meaning determines what
we can refer to. To saddle Heidegger with MDR, it would also be necessary to
show that he thinks we can only experience things in the terms of our prior,
internalist understanding. So, if there is evidence that Heidegger believes that
our experience of things is sometimes not linguistically articulated, then there
is good evidence to conclude that the stronger claim is not fairly attributable
to him. Finally, we should note that because the question is whether
attribution of the weaker or the stronger claim to Heidegger is correct, it
obviously does not support Lafont to Ž nd him saying things consistent with
the weaker claim – things like, ‘the understanding of being . . . lies at the
basis of all comportment to beings and guides it’.4
Lafont makes a number of arguments to support attributing the stronger
claim to Heidegger, and I couldn’t possibly tackle more than a couple of
them. So I’ve chosen to consider her arguments that bear most closely on a
subject of particular interest to me – the early Heidegger’s views of truth. Of
course, since her interpretation is based in a reading of Heidegger’s texts as a
 Heidegger, Truth, and Reference 221

whole, what I say here will hardly constitute a decisive refutation of her
approach. But I hope at least to provide some evidence that another reading is
possible – one that avoids the absurd consequences Lafont fears and, I
believe, is more consistent with Heidegger’s texts.

II. Lafont’s Evidence

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In what follows I examine some of Lafont’s arguments. I Ž rst discuss two of

the passages from Heidegger that Lafont believes provide direct evidence
for attributing MDR to him: Heidegger’s discussion of essences, and the
idea that ‘that which stands in view in advance, and the way in which it thus
stands, decides what we in fact see in each particular case’;5 and
Heidegger’s repeated insistence in Being and Time that entities can only
be uncovered on the basis of a ‘prior projection of their constitution of being
[Seinsverfassung ]’, or the similar claim that ‘only if the understanding of
Being is, do entities as entities become accessible’.6 In addition to such
direct evidence, Lafont frequently argues that some position of Heidegger’s
is only tenable on the basis of MDR. I conclude by looking at one such
indirect argument.
I turn, then, to Lafont’s reading of Heidegger’s view of essences, and the
way they constrain and determine what we experience. She writes:
To the extent that this knowledge of essence allows in advance for a distinction between
meaningful and meaningless propositions , and thereby separate s the sayable from the
unsayable, it makes up the condition of possibilit y of the knowledge of facts. With respect to
this latter kind of knowledge , the knowledge of essence has an a priori status, since it is
constitutive for our access to intraworldl y entities as such. This is the case insofar as the
knowledge of essence is what Ž rst discloses the being of entities, without which they could not
appear, and on which basis alone meaningful ascertainment s of fact can be made. In this sense,
‘the knowledge of essence guides and surpasses all experience and all comportment toward
entities’ (GA 45, p. 76). But at the same time, as such a knowledge of essence, it is also
responsibl e for the identiŽ cation of any individua l entity. Heidegger underscore s this in his WS
1937/38 Freiburg lecture course: ‘Ever in accordanc e with how we gather [erblicken ] essence
and to what extent we do so, we are also able to experience and to determine what is particula r
about things. That which stands in view in advance, and how it thus stands, decides what we in
fact see in each particula r case’. (GA 45, p. 65; [Lafont’s italics]) (p. 194)

We should, of course, observe that the Ž rst passage Lafont quotes is

evidence only for the weaker claim. And there is a real question whether the
second passage she quotes is fairly attributable to Heidegger himself. In the
sentence immediately preceding the quoted sentence, Heidegger explains
that he is discussing the platonic notion of essence. In the paragraph
immediately preceding the passage, Heidegger describes the platonic
notion of essence as ‘perhaps the most consequential, in uential, and
disastrous philosophica l deŽ nition in Western thinking’.7 A fuller and more
charitable reading of this lecture course would see that Heidegger is trying
 222 Mark A. Wrathall

to engage with the Greek determination of essence – not to adopt it, but
instead to move beyond it. The one thing he clearly doesn’t think we should
take over from the Greeks is Plato’s ‘disastrous’ deŽ nition of essence as an
idea that is always grasped in advance and determines what we see. It is
true that Heidegger thinks we have an understanding of things which
‘guides us constantly’, but this is not a determinate conceptual grasp of
what things are and must be. ‘The essence of things’, Heidegger notes, is
something ‘which we know and yet do not know.’8 Such a claim is hard to
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square with the MDR notion that what we can grasp subjectively of
meanings is sufŽ cient to Ž x the referent. In addition, Heidegger is quite
clear that in the view of essences he endorses, essences are not grasped
prior to our encounter with things and projected over them independently of
any encounter with them. Instead, he is precisely trying to complicate the
idea that essences are either elements of our experience that we project onto
things, or that we Ž nd them existing independently of our relationship to
things – the essence ‘is not manufactured, but it is also not simply
encountered like a thing already present at hand’.9 That is to say, once
again, he is pushing for a view that is neither subjective nor objective, a
view in which our understanding takes its measure from things but in which
we cannot distinguish our contribution to meaning from the world’s
contribution to meaning. He is, in these respects advocating a view of
meaning quite similar to Lafont’s champion Hilary Putnam: ‘One might say
not that we make the world, but that we help to deŽ ne the world. The rich
and ever-growing collection of truths about the world is the joint product of
the world and language users.’10
Let’s turn to the other passage I mentioned above – what can we say about
the way that our understanding of being grounds our experience of things? If
the ‘constitution of being’ is a linguistic or conceptual constitution, and if the
understanding of being is something like a grasp of the concepts by means of
which we pick out beings, and if the ‘meaning’ built into the constitution and
understanding of being is internalist, and thus doesn’t rely on the things
themselves, then such passages could support the claim that Heidegger is
committed to something like MDR.
Just as she should if she wants to show that Heidegger’s position is
grounded in MDR, Lafont argues at great length that the understanding of
being is a linguistically articulated understanding. She maintains, in
particular, that Heidegger’s category of the pre-predicative is, in fact,
predicative. The argument goes something like this: Heidegger maintains
that all pre-predicative experience is an experience of something as
something, and thus is already an experience which understands and
interprets. Lafont argues, however, that understanding and interpretation are
linguistic acts and consist in predicating something of something. There-
fore, our pre-predicative experience is in fact an implicit predication.
 Heidegger, Truth, and Reference 223

Indeed, she concludes in breathtaking fashion, the very category of the pre-
predicative in Heidegger’s thought provides further proof that Heidegger
adheres to MDR:
As an implicit presuppositio n for the thesis that the structure of ‘something as something’
already shows itself at the pre-predicativ e level, Heidegger must suppose that the relation of
designation (between name and object) can be understood as an implicit attribution. That is to
say, he must suppose that designation is possible only by means of a meaning, ‘in terms of
which something becomes intelligibl e as something’ (BT, p. 193), and thus that by merely
naming something a property is indirectl y ascribed to the object named. Through this implicit
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reduction of names to predicates, the foundatio n stone is already in place for the thesis that
meaning determines reference . This thesis lies at the basis of Heidegger’s view according to
which a referent, an entity, becomes accessible solely on the basis of a meaning that is therefore
constitutive for it as an ‘intraworldl y entity’. (pp. 53–54)

There is, however, another – I believe more faithful and charitable – way to
read Heidegger’s understanding of our pre-predicative experience of the
world. The distinction between the pre-predicative and the predicative is not
the distinction between an interpretation in which an object is identiŽ ed by an
implicit attribution on the one hand, and an interpretation in which an explicit
attribution is made to an object. Instead, the contrast is between different
kinds of articulation. ‘For it to be possible’, Heidegger explains, ‘predication
must be able to take up residence in a making-manifest that is not predicative
in character.’11 Heidegger explains that in predication a ‘ “subject” is given a
deŽ nite character by the “predicate” ’.12 ‘Subject’ and ‘predicate’ are put in
scare quotes to indicate the fact that, in our pre-predicative experience of the
world, things are not understood in terms of objects with properties. And he
explains the way predication ‘gives a deŽ nite character’ in terms of a
‘narrowing of content’. In our pre-predicative experience of the world, things
are understood as the things they are precisely in that they are taken
immediately as reaching out into a variety of involvements. In predication, by
contrast, our experience undergoes an ‘explicit restriction of our view’, and
we ‘dim down’ the whole richly articulated situation in front of us to focus on
some particular feature of the situation.13 It is that dimming down that Ž rst
makes it possible to give something a conceptual character – that is, it makes
it possible to discover the kind of determinate content which allows one to
form conceptual connections, draw inferences, and justify one occurrent
intentional state with another.
The pre-predicative, in other words, is a non-conceptual way of comporting
ourselves toward the things in the world around us. Heidegger explains:
Addressing something as something, however, does not yet necessaril y entail comprehendin g in
its essence whatever is thus addressed . The understanding of being (logos in a quite broad
sense) that guides and illuminates in advance all comportment toward beings is neither a
grasping of being as such, nor is it a conceptua l comprehendin g of what is thus grasped.14

Rather than a conceptual or a logical articulation, then, the pre-predicative

manifestness of things is articulated along the lines of our practical
 224 Mark A. Wrathall

comportment. In such an articulation, things show up as what they are, but in

the whole complexity of their involvements.15 We get a sense for the non-
predicative or non-conceptual nature of this articulation whenever we try to
describe what we know of things in advance. Heidegger notes:
We are acquainted with the ‘essence’ of the things surroundin g us: house, tree, bird, road,
vehicle, man, etc., and yet we have no knowledge of the essence. For we immediately land in the
uncertain, shifting, controversial , and groundless , when we attempt to determine more closely,
and above all try to ground in its determinateness , what is certainly though still indeterminatel y
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‘known’: namely, house-ness , tree-ness , bird-ness , humanness .16

This passage, of course, is relevant to the earlier discussion of Heideggerian

essences, which once again are understood in a way that would resist seeing
them as subjectively graspable meanings that determine in advance their
reference. But in addition, such passages, as I read them, show clearly that the
pre-predicative is not simply a not-yet uttered predication. Instead, it has a
different kind of content than that involved in predication. If this is true, then
the meaning at work in the understanding of being (which makes possible our
ability to relate to or ‘refer’ to particular things) is not the kind of meaning
that could be grasped by a proposition. This suggests that we ought not to
think of the way the understanding of being makes beings accessible by
analogy with the way a Fregean Sinn makes it possible to refer to an object.17
In fact, Heidegger’s view turns out to be the very antithesis of the position that
Lafont attributes to him. Rather than seeing language as the determinant and
mediator of our access to things, Heidegger sees our unmediated ‘being by’
(unmittelbares ‘Sein bei’) things in the world as the ground of language. We
do not Ž rst come to things through linguistic structures – ‘via the assertion
and the referential context upon which it depends’, he explains, ‘but rather the
other way around: only inasmuch as we are already at [a thing], maintain
ourselves by it, can it be the possible object of the assertion’.18
I’ve tried to argue that the way an understanding of Being grounds our
access to things is not the same way that a grasp of the sense of a naming term
determines its reference. And I’ve suggested that Heidegger doesn’t accept a
central presupposition of the MDR thesis – namely, that it is possible to
distinguish meaning from the world, or a knowledge of meaning from a
knowledge of the world. And this means that Heidegger is not committed to
the absurdly idealistic and relativistic views that Lafont fears. But let me
brie y elaborate on the claim that Heidegger, like Putnam, is an externalist
about meaning.
As Lafont notes, Putnam’s correction to MDR is not so much that he
denies that meaning determines reference in some broad sense, but that
instead he includes ‘extension as a component of meaning’. Thus, the ‘thesis
that meaning determines reference . . . becomes trivially correct’(p. 203). By
including extension in intension, the threat of idealism Lafont sees in MDR is
de-fanged, because our meanings already put us in contact with an objective
 Heidegger, Truth, and Reference 225

world. But Heidegger, too, sees the world around us as an integral

component in the meanings we have, i.e. in our understanding of things. He
sees that ‘Dasein is absorbed by beings in such a way that, in its belonging to
beings, it is thoroughly attuned by them. Transcendence means projection of
world in such a way that those beings that are surpassed also already
pervade and attune that which projects’.19 In other words, the unconceal-
ment of a world is not understood as a projection which could have the
content it does independently of the way things are. To the contrary, the
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beings that surround us are inextricably incorporated into our understanding

of things.
To review, according to MDR, meaning gives us the conceptual resources
for identifying an object. If this idea were transcendentalized, it might have
the consequence that we could only experience what we already had a
concept for. But Heidegger’s pre-predicative ‘as’ structure is not a
conceptual structure. If it grounds our access to objects, then, it must do
so in a different way. And if that is the case, then semantic theories of direct
reference, even if they succeed in responding to the many signiŽ cant
problems they encounter as semantic theories, are simply irrelevant to
Heidegger’s concerns. In addition, Heidegger, like Putnam and many other
direct reference theorists, has a kind of externalism already built into his
view of understanding.
I close by considering one of Lafont’s indirect proofs for Heidegger’s
adherence to MDR. Lafont contends that Heidegger’s view of assertoric truth
as uncovering only makes sense, or is only tenable, on the assumption that
MDR. Again, I begin by quoting Lafont – this time her discussion of
Heidegger’s (in)famous treatment of truth as uncovering. She writes:
The question that becomes ever more pressing is whether or not the normative concept of
correctnes s can be accommodate d in (or extracted from) the concept of uncoverednes s that
Heidegger suggests. We have already seen that the normative moment of comparison (‘such-
as’) represent s the fundamenta l characteristi c of the concept of truth for Heidegger. This is
mirrored in the Ž rst deŽ nition: ‘the entity that is intended shows itself in such a way as it is in
itself.’ Through the ensuing reformulation , in which the ‘such-as’ formula of comparison was
transforme d into the identity of the ‘showing itself as the same’, there resulted the second
deŽ nition: ‘that the statement is true means: . . . it “lets” the entity “be seen” in its
uncoveredness ’ (BT, p. 261). This is an obvious conclusion only under the additiona l
assumption (which lies at the basis of the whole enterprise of Being and Time) that meaning
determines reference – and therefore that ‘the things themselves ’ are nothing but the ‘entities in
the “how” of their uncoveredness. ’ (p. 135)

The argument Lafont is making is somewhat sketchy, but I think it can be

easily reconstructed. Heidegger, she notes, treats as equivalent two apparently
different formulations of the concept of truth. The Ž rst is the claim that an
assertion is true only if the entity intended in the assertion ‘is just as it gets
pointed out in the assertion as being’.20 The second formulation is the claim
that an assertion is true only if the assertion ‘points out, “lets” the entity “be
seen” in its uncoveredness’. Treating these formulations as equivalent, Lafont
 226 Mark A. Wrathall

suggests, requires that what the entity is, in itself, be identical with the entity
as it is understood by us. And this, Lafont argues, is simply to accept MDR in
the transcendental version outlined above – that is, to accept that entities are
constituted by the meanings in terms of which we think about them.
It seems to me, however, that Lafont is simply mistaken in believing that
Heidegger’s reformulation hinges on his accepting MDR. In fact, the
reformulation is quite compatible with a causal theory of reference, because
what is at stake here is not how particular terms refer to particular entities, but
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rather how a whole meaningful sentence can be true or false.

To make sense of Heidegger’s reformulation, we need make no
assumptions at all about how terms refer to entities. Instead, we need only
distinguish carefully between the reference of a term and the reference of a
whole assertion. The passage that Lafont quotes is concerned with assertions
as a whole, not terms, for it is the assertion as a whole which is true or false.
And while many (but perhaps not all) assertions must refer to some entity in
order to be true or false, it is not the referring alone which makes it true or
false. In addition to referring to an entity, it must say something of the entity.
Let’s take an example of a Donnellan-case of non-MDR: if I say ‘The
philosopher that Lafont refutes was a Nazi’, this assertion is not true or false
simply because I succeed in referring to someone. It is only true if I am
referring to someone, and that person was a Nazi. One, quite proper way to
describe this is to say that the assertion is only true if the entity to which the
description refers ‘is just as it gets pointed out in the assertion as being’.
Notice that this Ž rst formulation of the truth of the assertion is in fact agnostic
about the question of reference – that is to say, truth goes beyond simply
referring to an entity. This is true whether my assertion succeeded in directly
referring to Heidegger (through a referential use of a deŽ nite description, for
instance), or whether it could only refer to a philosophe r that Lafont has
actually refuted. However the reference is determined, we still will say that
the assertion is only true if the entity the description points out or refers to is
just the way that the assertion points it out as being. This is because it is not
the entity, but the condition of the entity, the entity in a state of affairs, which
is the truth maker of the proposition.
The same goes for the reformulation, since what is being reformulated is
the way of talking about the truth-maker of the whole assertion, rather than
the satisŽ er of the referring term or description. It follows that Heidegger
doesn’t need to make any assumptions at all about how terms refer when he
reformulates his deŽ nition of assertoric truth by saying that an assertion is
only true if it ‘points out, “lets” the entity “be seen” in its uncoveredness’.21
This is because the entity ‘in its uncoveredness’ isn’t the entity alone but
rather is the entity in a particular condition, or the entity in a state of affairs.
Now, one can believe that an assertion is only true if it uncovers the entity in
its uncoveredness, even if one denies that MDR. My assertion that ‘Water
 Heidegger, Truth, and Reference 227

quenches thirst’ is only true if the assertion lets the entity referred to by
‘water’ be seen in its uncoveredness – that is, only if it correctly points out
that this entity quenches thirst. This is true, even if (contrary to MDR) the
entity referred to by ‘water’ is, say, the microstructure of water, and is quite
unknown to the person making the assertion.
Thus, the deŽ nition of assertoric truth as uncovering in no way hangs on the
thesis that MDR. It only depends on the whole fact (of which the entity is a
part) being interchangeably describable either as ‘the entity as pointed out in
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the assertion as being’, or ‘the entity in its uncoveredness’. And one can
believe that these descriptions are interchangeable without accepting MDR.
While it isn’t decisive for interpreting Heidegger, it helps to illustrate the
irrelevance of MDR to this issue to note that there are philosophers who deny
MDR and yet insist that there is no way to determine that to which the whole
sentence ‘corresponds’ except through an assertion.22

NOTES

1 Because Lafont’s primary concern is with naming terms rather than predicates, I will focus
on the elements of meaning for names, rather than the sense in which predicates determine
a reference through their meaning.
2 See Hilary Putnam, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning” ’, in Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
3 M. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenolog y, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington /
Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 66.
4 Ibid., p. 75.
5 M. Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre
Schuwer (Bloomington/Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 65, cited by
Lafont at pp. 113, 153, 194, and 265.
6 M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962) (hencefort h BT), p. 255. See, e.g., p. 253.
7 Basic Questions of Philosophy, op. cit., p. 58.
8 Ibid., p. 73.
9 Ibid., p. 77.
10 ‘Reply to David Anderson’, Philosophical Topics 20 (1992), p. 368.
11 ‘On the Essence of Ground’, in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. and ed. William
McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 103, emphasis in the original.
This is a funny thing to be emphatic about if the pre-predicativ e is in fact implicitly
predicative.
12 BT, p. 196, emphasis in original.
13 See, e.g., BT, p. 197.
14 ‘On the Essence of Ground’, op. cit., p. 104 (some emphasis supplied) .
15 See also M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill
and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington /Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 333
(‘what is originary and primary is, and constantl y remains, the full undifferentiate d
manifold . . . [which] becomes a particula r meaning via limitation’) and p. 341 (where the
pre-predicativ e is equated with the pre-logical) .
16 Basic Questions of Philosophy, op. cit., p. 73.
17 This would also show how, contrary to Lafont’s assertions , it is not necessar y to assume
MDR in order to conclude that all seeing is seeing as, because not all seeing as is seeing in
terms of a particula r description . Names, to put it in Lafont’s terms, need not be reduced to
predicates. We could, for instance, in good Heideggeria n fashion imagine that a name has
 228 Mark A. Wrathall

as its content a pre-predicativ e as without accepting that we grasp the content through our
grasp of a description , because the content of the pre-predicativ e as is not co-extensiv e with
the content of any particula r description . Or, we could even accept that names directly refer
to their objects, while still accepting the view that all seeing is a pre-predicativ e seeing as,
because the semantic role of names is a distinct issue from the content of our experienc e of
the world.
18 M. Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. Otto Saame, Martin Heidegger:
Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), div 2, 27, p. 67.
19 ‘The Essence of Ground’, op. cit., emphasis in original, p. 128.
20 BT, p. 261.
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21 Ibid.
22 See, e.g., Donald Davidson, ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy
LXXXVII (1990), 303–4.

Received 11 March 2002

Mark A. Wrathall, Department of Philosophy , Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602,

USA. E-mail: maw2@email.byu.ed u